blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

It is a curious incongruity that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  - widely considered one of the great American novels -  was first published in Great Britain. Released stateside in February 1885, the book has remained in constant state of controversy ever since. The subject of that controversy, however, has vacillated considerably according to the mores of the time.

Twain initially intended the book as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Its first working title was Huckleberry Finn’s Autobiography;

This week we celebrate Edward St. John Gorey, born February 22, 1925. “He was a cartoonist in the widest definition and a major illustrator in the smallest,” said friend Alexander Theroux. “Edward was one of the few people I ever knew who did exactly what he wanted.” Gorey published over 100 books and illustrated dozens for other writers, including Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Edward Lear, Muriel Spark, John Updike, and H. G. Wells. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and illustrated every anniversary cover between 1978 and 1998. Editor Barbara Epstein described his drawings as “beautiful, ravishing.”

This week we celebrate the birthday of Amy Tan, author of the acclaimed novel, The Joy Luck Club.  Tan was born on February 19, 1952 to Chinese immigrants in Oakland, California. America was a place of refuge for her family; her mother fled to America to escape her abusive first husband and Tan’s father immigrated to avoid the Chinese Civil War.

As a girl, Tan rejected her Chinese heritage. She disliked her Asian appearance and even slept with a clothespin on her nose to narrow its shape. “I felt ashamed of being different and ashamed of feeling that way,” she later commented. Instead, she embraced everything American.

Celebrated English poet and leader of the Romantic movement, George Gordon Byron, is as well known for his personal life as for his poetry Byron famously embodied the Romantic hero, and influenced countless other writers including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Emily Brontë, and Alexander Pushkin.

Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie de Beauvoir is remembered as an eminent French philosopher, writer, and feminist. She is best known for her books, She Came to Stay (1943), The Second Sex (1949), and The Mandarins (1954). Beauvoir is also famous for her lifelong relationship with legendary dramatist Jean-Paul Sartre.

Nicholas Sparks, one of the fiction world’s most popular and prolific writers, was born on December 31, 1965. Author of eighteen books, Sparks has over 89 million copies in print, and his novels have been translated into over 50 languages. Eight of his books have been adapted into film.

Sparks first achieved popularity with The Notebook, his second novel. A love story inspired by his wife’s grandparents, he wrote the book in six months at the age of 28. Two years after its completion, he had found a literary agent, received a $1 million dollar advance, and become an instant New York Times bestselling author.

“A Visit from St. Nicholas”—also known as, “Twas the Night before Christmas” and “The Night before Christmas”—has become one of the most beloved poems in the United States. Published anonymously in 1823, this poem was integral in shaping the American conception of St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. Yet despite its lighthearted content, a bitter controversy once arose over its authorship.

The poem was uncredited for 21 years. Finally, in 1844, professor Clement Clarke Moore claimed authorship of the poem, printing it in an anthology of his poetry. Moore stated that he had only acknowledged the poem at his children’s insistence, not wanting such a childish poem to detract from his scholarly reputation.

If, in the words of James Barron Hope, “Tis after death that we measure men,” William Blake is fortunate indeed. Now a paragon of the Romantic Age whose poems and engravings are among the most famous of his time, Blake’s contemporaries dismissed his work and largely considered him insane. William Wordsworth wrote, “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad” and John Ruskin called him “diseased and wild.” Although his work was not understood during his lifetime, Blake has become one of the most important poets, engravers, and artists of the Romantic Age.

Today we celebrate the inimitable Kay Thompson, born November 9, 1909 with the unpromising name Catherine Fink. A brilliant composer, dancer, singer, and author, Thompson was above all a tremendous personality.  In the words of film critic, Rex Reed, “If you don’t know who Kay Thompson is, please turn the page. You just flunked pizazz. Legend has it that she even invented the word.”